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If Hell is other people, 18-year-old Bridget Murphy has certainly been there. The hero of Lynn Coady's celebrated first novel,
Strange Heaven, would like nothing more than to disengage from the world. But nobody--especially the folks back home in Cape Breton--will leave her alone.
The doctors think she's apathetic. After the traumatic birth of her infant son, they transfer her to the psych ward of the Halifax children's hospital. There she spends her days listening to the rants of a manic teenaged stripper and dodging the sexual advances of a pimply megalomaniac who thinks he's the next Jesus Christ. Discharged in time for Christmas, she returns home to the same domestic bedlam and boozy social life that got her into trouble in the first place. As if living with a foul-mouthed 100-year-old grandmother and a developmentally delayed uncle weren't challenging enough, Bridget also discovers that there's no escaping the people who think getting pregnant should have made her "properly penitent" or the high-school friends who can't understand that anything's changed--not to mention the verbally abusive boyfriend who wants to sue her for giving up their baby.
Coady gives this story of teenaged pregnancy a slyly comic treatment that mitigates the tragic aspects of Bridget's situation. It's impossible not to laugh at Bridget's grandmother spitting out her Christmas dinner because "it's full of the cancer" or a sex-starved wardmate "going for the taco" every time Bridget lets down her guard. While it shares limitations with other first novels (such as occasionally awkward writing), Strange Heaven marks an exciting debut for this Cape Breton-born writer--at its best, rivalling Roddy Doyle's black comedies of Dublin life. --Lisa Alward
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Books in Canada
A strong narrator appears in Lynn Coady's
Strange Heaven in the form of Bridget Murphy. Bridget, almost eighteen, is hibernating in the psychiatric ward of a Halifax children's hospital after the birth of her baby, which she has given up for adoption and in whose father she has not the slightest interest. She likes the routine, the predictability of hospital life, so different from her chaotic, emotionally turbulent home environment in a small Cape Breton town. When her uncle insists that Bridget return home for the Christmas holidays, she is faced once again with family and friends, all of whom she finds trying; they require far too much energy.
Despite her seeming apathy, Bridget is a survivor with an appealing sense of black humour and a healthy disdain for convention. The voice in Strange Heaven is clear, resonant, and unmistakably true-certainly a notable accomplishment for any writer but perhaps even more so for one who, like Coady, is only twenty-eight. Eva Tihanyi(Books in Canada)
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
by George Clarke
by Guillermo Verdecchia
by Guy Vanderhaeghe
by Lynn Coady
by Sharon Pollock
